You are burning an artificial technical straw-man. There is no technical capacity limit at play here. Networking technology has leapfrogged the bandwidth available to consumers many times over, and to boot, it is pretty much infinitely scalable.
So when theres no problem transferring all of Netflix, Skype and BitTorrent simultaneously, why slow any of it? Sure, at times hardware fails, fiber is damaged, and ISPs can feel free to prioritize traffic at that time, we certainly have the technology to do that.
But what is certainly not ok is slowing traffic because you are not willing to invest into your connectivity, investing not even enough to actually deliver all of the meagre bandwidth (100 Mbit is 1995 vintage technology, where in the US can you even get that?) you have sold to consumers.
There is no technical capacity limit at play here.
This. The US market is ripe for disruption or regulation. Sure, if you live remotely in Arizona, it may be hard to get a fat pipe, but it seems that even most cities have outrageous prices.
I currently live in Germany. We have 150MBit downstream, 5 MBit upstream, plus phone and television for 40 Euro per month. When we lived in The Netherlands we were on 130 MBit downstream internet. Even in the stone age (2004) we had 20MBit downstream DSL for 20 Euro per month. Since downloading music and movies was legal in the Netherlands until recently, many families were saturating their connections. Netflix is not that demanding in comparison.
The current situation in the EU shows that it is possible to get high-speed low-cost internet with net neutrality.
Strikes me folks here are really complaining about a broken cable market, made up of local monopolies.
I googled the American cable market a bit, and some of what was described - the cable majors carving up the country so as not to compete, or aggressively blocking new competitors - that stuff sounds like anti-competitive practice.
Writing from a country with a functioning cable market, when I hear 'ISP will charge for X', I think 'Well I will change ISP then'. If you can't do that, I think net neutrality is the least of your problems.
There's no technical capacity limit, that's true -- but there are operational and financial constraints. Replacing a half million routers across the country to remove the previous technical constraints isn't an easy or fast thing to do: the hardware will be obsolete before the implementation is finished.
Think about everything that goes into this: they can't just pick a piece of hardware off of Amazon; they have to review proposals for companies to manufacture and support the hardware over their 10-year lifespan. They then have to train their employees on them, develop migration plans, rollback plans, schedule maintenance windows, etc. These migration plans often involve significant changes to CPE configurations, which also need to be planned, tested, implemented and trained for.
It's a huge infrastructure. It costs a lot of money to make any significant change. And you seem to be confusing Ethernet with a last-mile technology; it's more of a last hundred feet technology. A lot of the effort over the last 10 years has been spent moving the telecom-owned equipment closer to consumer homes so that faster speeds can be obtained over shorter cable runs. As the length of a cable run increases, so does interference and you have to dial down speeds as a result (this is even true of fiber, albeit to a lesser extent).
I'm painfully aware of just what lengths telcos will go to to press the last bit of (downstream) bandwidth out of the taxpayer funded land line infrastructure they have been gifted. Thats what I'm saying: they have no interest in investing. Who will wake them up and tell them that no, you can't bridge another 20 years of progress on fucking bell wire? Do we like send them postcards explaining the Shannon-Hartley theorem?
But the terrible state of last-mile technology in the field isn't even what this is about. Netflix servers and the intermediaries they peer with are not in a shed in Nebraska with data coming in over microwave. Telcos don't invest in the last mile where they would have to create actual infrastructure, they don't invest where high technology rules in the heart of data exchanges all over the world.
(Of course ethernet isn't the relevant benchmark here, but at that time it wasn't just about what you could do over a hundred feet of copper, but also at what speed systems could actually communicate.)
So when theres no problem transferring all of Netflix, Skype and BitTorrent simultaneously, why slow any of it? Sure, at times hardware fails, fiber is damaged, and ISPs can feel free to prioritize traffic at that time, we certainly have the technology to do that.
But what is certainly not ok is slowing traffic because you are not willing to invest into your connectivity, investing not even enough to actually deliver all of the meagre bandwidth (100 Mbit is 1995 vintage technology, where in the US can you even get that?) you have sold to consumers.